James Taylor and Pineapple Blocks

Good night, you moonlight ladies

Rock a bye sweet baby James

Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose,

Won’t you let me go down in my dreams…

Do you remember this song?

It’s been floating around my head this week as I sew.

A lot.

So much so, that I’ve put the song on repeat, and listened to as many artists playing it as I can.

I keep circling back to my earliest memory of the James Taylor song.

When I was in high school, I followed my friend’s parents to a roving potluck. My friend had been going to the First Friday Sing her entire life, and to her, it was just an embarrassing thing her parents did. But to me, it was magical. Here was a group of people who would come together, once a month, simply for the love of music. The food was exotic, and the collection of adults were fascinating and ever changing, and the music…. The music was filled with warmth, and love, and a reflection of the blend of individual lives and the group dynamics that played out through the dinner conversation and the music that followed.

Sweet Baby James was a song that sort of floated by me as a teenager. It wasn’t Bob Dylan, and it wasn’t Joan Baez, so it didn’t catch my attention much. It wasn’t a Simon and Garfunkel song (thank goodness- because it was a longstanding joke that the First Friday Sing folks could butcher any Simon and Garfunkel song beyond recognition), but it was a pleasant song that I could kind of muddle my way through by watching, and listening to, the singers around me.

There’s a song that they sing when they take to the highway,

A song that they sing when they take to the sea

A song that they sing of their home in the sky

Maybe you can believe it if it helps you to sleep

The singing works just fine for me

Bob was the song leader, the anchor of the music. Chris played the dulcimer, and when the dulcimer wasn’t needed in a song (or it wasn’t worth retuning), he’d set the dulcimer up on his knees, drape his wrists over the curve of the body, and just sing. Bob and Meed, and Chris and Susan, were the foundation of the sing in those years, providing the structure, the space- if you will, for the unique and evolving collaboration that was the First Friday Sing.

I’m pacing my way through a scrappy pineapple quilt.

It’s nothing special, really… just some paper piecing, ten miles behind me, and ten thousand more to go. But with the teal focus, deep greens and blues are the colors I choose, and the plodding nature of construction, I keep pondering Sweet Baby James, and my high school memories of the First Friday Sing. Each block is like a Sing, the structure remains the same. And yet, the scraps I use are wild and unpredictable, and each piece flavors the whole block, the same way the cocktail of participants and the season of their individual lives shifted the dynamic of every First Friday Sing.

I started this quilt more than a year ago, and it was… an execution. Execution is the word I like to use for an artistic expression (in this case a quilt) that isn’t driven by an artistic purpose. For example, I would consider a ‘paint by number’ or a ‘paint along with Bob Ross’ activity to be an execution. However, if you pick up a paintbrush to communicate an idea, or an emotion… art can exist, and the execution simply becomes the means to the end result. (Art).

YouTube is choked with amateur covers of great songs. Most of the offerings are… executions. A young musician, trying to sound like The Plain White Ts, Frank Sinatra, Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney… these homages exist because the young artists want to sound like, or be like, their idols. But often, if a young musician spends enough time executing music, they’ll learn to interpret the music of their Rock Stars. They’re not sophisticated enough to fully create their own music, or they’re not interested in creating their own music, but the step of interpreting the music of others is a step in the right direction. They’re finding their voice as an artist, as a creator, and they’re gathering the building blocks to one day follow their own intuition, artistic drive, vision.

When we take the design of a rock star quilter, and tailor it to our own vision… are we essentially cover artists who have made the leap to interpreting the art of others rather than executing a reproduction?

Initially, my pineapple quilt was an execution, and the only artistic interpretation I applied to the project was the Teal focus fabric, and the blend of scraps within each block.

But, this week, as I’ve been executing my way to the finish line, I’ve organically started to ponder the meaning, and the intention of this project. Because the quilt is intertwined with the layers of my memories and the soundtrack of an old James Taylor song, has my quilt shifted to art?

Jan

PS. What kind of quilt are you making right now? An execution, an interpretation, or an Art?